The U.S. Government is Spreading Malware

Some years ago, I predicted the government was reading all of our e-mails and looking at our financial records. I thought I was on the edge of the curve, understanding what others did not. I was wrong. I only anticipated the edge of the iceberg. Those crazy bureaucrats sucked up more information than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams.

And now our pseudo-protectors are planting malware in our computers to evade our protections.

They are deliberately sabotaging our property. Others can piggyback in on the holes they are making in our anti-virus programs. They are making all of us vulnerable to hacking and theft.

Isn’t this a crime? If not, shouldn’t it be?

James Pilant

Mark Zuckerberg: US government surveillance is a threat to the internet | Technology | theguardian.com

The billionaire CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, criticised US government surveillance in a Facebook post on Thursday, saying it was a “threat” to the internet – and revealed he had called Barack Obama personally to air his concerns.

Zuckerberg made his remarks a day after the The Intercept website reported that the NSA has been using automated systems to spread malware over the internet, sometimes using “fake” Facebook servers.

“The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Thursday. “They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.”

In the post, Zuckerberg said he had called Obama to express his “frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future” and said he was confused by the government’s actions.

“The internet works because most people and companies do the same. We work together to create this secure environment and make our shared space even better for the world,” he wrote.

He went on: “This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.”

From around the web.

German computer security and antivirus detection company G Data Security has alleged that the Russian goverment has created, or has contributed to the creation of the newly detected malware known as “Uroburos”.

G Data bases its allegations on the Russian governement in the complexity of the malware and the presence of Cyrillic words in the malware sample. File names, encryption keys, and the behaviour of Uroburos are also being used to support G Data’s claim.

Another key piece of “evidence” according to G Data blogger “MN”, is that Uroburos functions by looking for a piece of malware that has been tied to Russia (although not its government conclusively).